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Binary Body Double: Microsoft Reveals the Science Behind Project Natal for Xbox 360
Microsoft
When Nintendo's Wii game console debuted in November 2006, its motion-sensing handheld "Wiimotes" got players off the couch and onto their feet.
Now Microsoft is trying to outdo its competitor by eliminating the controller altogether: It has revealed details of how it developed Project Natal, which gives Xbox 360 players the ability to manipulate on-screen characters via natural body movements.
The machine-learning technology will enable players to do things such as kick a digital soccer ball or swat a handball in their living rooms simply by mimicking the motion. "Instead of a controller, your body becomes the game input," says Alex Kipman, Microsoft's director of incubation for Xbox 360.
Microsoft introduced its ambitious Xbox upgrade in June 2009 and expects to ship the technology in time for the year-end 2010 holiday season.
Natal will consist of a depth sensor that uses infrared signals to create a digital 3-D model of a player's body as it moves, a video camera that can pick up fine details such as facial expressions, and a microphone that can identify and locate individual voices.
Programming a game system to discern the human body's almost limitless combinations of joint positions is a fearsome computational problem. "Every single motion of the body is an input, so you'd need to program near infinite reactions to actions," Kipman says.
Instead of trying to preprogram actions, Microsoft decided to teach its gaming technology to recognize gestures in real time just like a human does: by extrapolating from experience. Jamie Shotton, a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge in England, devised a machine learning algorithm for that purpose.
It also recognizes poses and renders them in the game space on-screen at 30 frames per second, a rate that conveys smooth movement. Essentially, Natal-enhanced Xboxes will do motion capture on the fly, without the need for the mirror-studded spandex suit of conventional motion-capture approaches.
From Scientific American
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